We are currently challenged with setting up a Global Service Desk. Has anyone gone through this process and have any advice on any problems that they have encountered and any traps we should be looking out for? What is the key, in your opinion, to a successful implementation of a Global Service Desk?

I am not sure if your vision of a global service means a central service desk, or many service desks, or even an outsourced service desk. All of which have their own pros and cons.

1) Executive sponsorship must occur at the top of the organization, and must be more than just lip service. Without executive sponsorship driving this initiative, it can quickly lose momentum and you will face challenges.

2) Standard processes.
a. You need to have all of the key stakeholders involved and bought into the concept of a global service desk.
b. You need to get everyone handling incidents the same way across the organization.
c. Define process flows that will achieve this and ensure everyone buys into them.

3) Communication is very important.
a. Involve people early on, and throughout the process.

4) Define roles and responsibilities.
a. You will need clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
b. Those people in these role, now become your “champion” to continue to support and defend the service desk.

While this is a starting point, there is a lot of work that goes into an initiative like this. Do not underestimate the time required. You will face time differences; there may be language concerns, etc

As for dealing with languages, you need to determine how you want your metrics to be presented. If the need is to roll it up the results to senior management, then it would be best to standardize on one language. Remember, a global service desk, does imply only one service desk to the customer.

We are currently challenged with setting up a Global Service Desk. Has anyone gone through this process and have any advice on any problems that they have encountered and any traps we should be looking out for? What is the key, in your opinion, to a successful implementation of a Global Service Desk?

Or you can outsource and the company can do all the work. You could try Softwin, it's located in Romania and the there are extremly cost effective. I've tried them and there are good and efficient people. And also they have excelent language capabilities.

Those are good lists but, as I will be starting to look at Global SD soon as well, I would be interested in understanding for instance, what the most common challenges are, and how to practically circumvent them.

Here are a few of the challenges my company faces:

- Language: company present in 70 countries

- Existing local resources: at least an IT guy on every site. Not always 100% 1st level support but he/she knows the local infrastructure, local language, etc.

- maturity levels: company organized in 3 main regions. Have diff. levels of maturity in IT operations.

- Growth: company acquires new business units continuously.

Obviously these are just a few but some info on how to tackle them successfully, ... or where to find the information on how to tackle them successfully would be most welcome...

Guys, the items you have mentioned and the other gentleman, just a few items from longer list you have to consider. We have implemented a GSD for a leader enterprise in IT service mangement in North America. You have to devide your projects into three main parts:
1- People: Service culture for each region and how they do their business at the current state and your objective for them to adapt your project.
2- Process: for each region or country has it's own process, you have to consider that and for them to adapt your process project.
3- Technology: you have to come up with a tool that can serve and support multilingual and time zone for SLA calculation.

The above was followed and our project went well to support world wide customers from centralized data centre.

If you have this kind of challenges i recommend to outsource this project to a specialised company. If you want a could recommend you a company based in Eastern Europe. I worked with them and they have excellent Language capabilities (for your 70 countries), 5 years of setting up this kind of projects and not the last very good prices comparing to Western Europe

1.Support Unicode for multi language entry on one system and valiable language screens
2. Ensure application is 100% web based or you will have the worst time of your life rolling this out and maintaining it
3. As mentioned before make sure the app supports full time zoning for all areas including SLA, updates, version control and reports.

That's the easy bit, the hard bit is getting everyone to agree in which case you should probably work for the UN instead.[/list]

Has anyone had issues with sharing employee data or consumer data? We are having issues with EU rules around where data is stored.

Could you be more explicit?

There are actually Personal Data Protection legal rules in Europe , according to which you cannot collect, use , share and furthermore distribute some private data (especially related to gender, origin, religion, ...)

If you explain more what your problem is , I can possibly assist or point you to an appropriate source (you can at least try the European Commission web site)

Basically:
1) collecting the above mentioned information (gender, origin, religion, sexual preferences, ...) is purely forbidden. If you need so, you have to get a special authorization.
2) you can collect (other) personal data as long as the data you collect, how long you store them, how many people can access them is aligned with the purpose of data collection and usage
3) whatever the type of personal data you collect, you need to inform the person about the type of data and how they will be used
4) you need to inform and grant the person access to the data so thay can check them and have modifications made if appropriate (that service must be free of charge).
5) you cannot share the data with third parties that have not signed the European agreement sit in a country that has not signed it .... To tel the truth, for example, USA and the exception regulations passed after Sept. 11th are totally are considered as violating those rights (hence lots of problems like about air travel regulations....)